What Empire Loyalists Are Really Saying When They Bash Julian Assange

Wired has just published what might be the single most brazenly dishonest and manipulative piece of down-punching empire smut that I have ever read. An article by Virginia Heffernan titled “The Real Houseguest of the Ecuadorian Embassy” revolves around the outright lie that Julian Assange is suing the Ecuadorian government because he doesn’t feel like cleaning up after his cat and maintaining basic hygiene in the embassy he’s been confined to since 2012. In reality, the legal case arose from the fact that despite being granted political asylum for his journalism, Assange has for months been cut off from the world and forbidden to practice journalism by the new government of Ecuador, and would remain unable to practice journalism under the new conditions Quito recently imposed upon him.

The article reads as though its author is attempting to force snarky humor through a thick fog of hatred and personal misery while seeing how many lies she can pack into each paragraph. Heffernan claims falsely that Assange is “wanted on various criminal charges”; Assange has not been charged with anything. Heffernan claims falsely that Assange “has been closely linked to the Kremlin and Russian president Vladimir Putin”; this is just objectively false with no evidence backing it up whatsoever. Heffernan claims falsely that “the distinct possibility has surfaced that during his embassy tenure Assange communicated with Roger Stone, Donald Trump’s consigliere, via magic decoder rings or the internet”; there’s no evidence that Stone had any back channel with WikiLeaks, and the information he notoriously amplified was already public. Heffernan claims falsely that WikiLeaks is “Russia-aligned”; another assertion for which there is zero evidence and much evidence to the contrary.

You get the picture. I’m not going to spend an entire article beating up on some writer for Wired just for authoring an amazingly horrible article about Julian Assange, especially when there are so very, very many other ambitious presstitutes falling all over themselves in a mad scramble to do the exact same thing right now.

Just as new information begins surfacing that Assange’s safety and security may be in immediate jeopardy, the brave, dauntless journalists of the establishment press have been working around the clock to bring their audiences as many versions as possible of the crucial bombshell news story that the WikiLeaks founder is a stinky, stinky man. Like it would even matter if that were true. Like the barely disguised plot to extradite a journalist for the crime of publishing facts to the same nation which tortured Chelsea Manning would be any less Orwellian if that journalist didn’t change his sheets often enough.

But that, of course, is not the point. The point is to create public revulsion for Julian Assange, thereby killing sympathy for his unconscionable persecution and dampening the impact of any future WikiLeaks releases. The point is to marry Assange’s name with the idea of bad smells, so that the public will begin to find themselves increasingly disgusted by him and everything he stands for without quite remembering exactly why they feel such disdain for him.

And there are more than enough aspiring pundits out there trying to do exactly that. Every story you see about Assange’s plight in mainstream media now goes out of its way to drag the focus away from the fact that a political prisoner has had his important voice silenced, and suck it into some vapid narrative about personal hygiene and kitty litter. Every few minutes there’s some blue-checkmarked goon making a juvenile tweet about how weird and gross Julian Assange is like a high school bully. There is no shortage of empire loyalists looking to prove themselves worthy lackeys before the watchful eyes of current and future employers.

It isn't just governments that kill journalists, it is other journalists. The world's biggest media outlets ignore multiple UN rulings to scream about cat food & hygiene, while the most significant publisher of our generation remains arbitrarily detained in London #EndImpunity

And make no mistake, that is all it is ever about. The reason almost every journalist below a certain age has a Twitter account these days is because they are taught in no uncertain terms that building a social media profile is an essential part of the job. They know that their social media presence can be just as much a determining factor in whether or not they keep climbing the ladder of prestige and influence as their resume is. Reporters in western corporate media aren’t usually explicitly told to protect establishment interests, but the ones who consistently do are the ones who get hired to the choice jobs. Making a big show about what a good empire lackey you are by smearing Julian Assange at a key juncture in his fight is a great way to show your peers and superiors that you’re someone who plays along with the beltway groupthink, and the fact that Assange cannot defend himself from those smears makes it extremely risk-free.

So when you see some political writer yukking it up about Julian Assange and kitty litter, what they are really saying is, “Hey! Look at me! You can count on me to advance whatever narratives get passed down from on high! I’ll cheer on all the wars! I’ll play up the misdeeds of our great nation’s rivals and ignore the misdeeds of our allies! I’ll literally spit on Assange if you’ll give my career a boost!”

They are saying, “I support everything the media-controlling oligarchs support, and I hate everything they hate. I will be a reliable mouthpiece of the ruling class regardless of who is elected in our fake elections to our fake official government. I will say all the right things. I will protect what you need protected. I will hide what you want hidden. I understand what you want me to do without your explicitly telling me to do it. I’ve got what you need. I have no principles. Look, I’m even joining in the dog pile against a political prisoner who can’t defend himself.”

Reporters who bash Julian Assange while he is silenced instead of using their platforms to draw attention to the many, many wicked deeds that are being perpetrated by the powerful in their own country are the lowest of the low. They are scum. They are the scum that scum scrapes off its shoes. There is no more despicable, sniveling waste of space on this earth than someone who attacks the powerless on behalf of the powerful while calling themselves a journalist.

Latest comments

Dawn Garmon/November 27, 2018

Gary Clevenger/November 25, 2018

G wiz… wanna puke:

It is ever more evident that the printing press is the vehicle of propaganda… The object conditioning of the masses, is, the axiom of confusion and literary disgust… As the gut becomes more saturated with misinformation and disinformation…the mind becomes a wasteland of never ending nightmares of returning to the homogeneous workings of commonsense and logic, in proportions to any logical reality. We have never ever known real reality in the imperialist dichotomy of European conquest of the indigenous. And or, the truth that this nation was built by the Machiavellian aristocracy of kingship rule… Here the vail of illusion distorts the truth of Collective Capitalism, by the few, for the few, and those sycophants that have learned the lessons of the merchant masters of planet Rothschild as well, the educational system of lawyer-up!

Yes your Honor! This is a parliamentarians dream of controls by the kings of mammon and all things distorted as truth… Here the rule of laws, are broken by the gifted educated Oligarchy, gifted to rule by creation of obtuse Laws for the few, designed to keep the commoner and half-witted formal educated Intelligentsia in power. Here intelligence is wasted on the sycophant followers of the Freedom Dream.

True freedom cannot kill with impunity… The indigenous in the new world and those that are being slaughtered by the new world order, by, the US lead, CFRians of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Parliamentarians of Royal British Rule and the new Apartheid In the middle east… have for better or worse, been culpable for the millions of lives wasted in the zone of slavery by force, and the illusion of “We The People”, for so long… It boggles the mind to think there is one ounce of sanity in the indoctrinated masses of American Psychopathy…? Object reality and or reason is none existent in the minds of Zombie Americana… The intelligentsia of the sycophants that teach the indoctrination of insanity… aka… Keep doing the same thing over and over, and expect a different result… Journalism is doomed by the proxy latter indifference of the masses!

Patricia Ormsby/November 5, 2018

It is not the first time Wired has used sarcastic “humor” to take down a good man fighting a desperate battle against TPTB . Shame on their obnoxious rag!

The other victim I know of, Arthur Firstensberg, shrugged it off and told me later that, in fact, the nasty piece had generated a lot of sympathy for him, with people writing in response to thank him for alerting them, through the article, to the dangers of electromagnetic pollution, as if they had completely overlooked the entire purport of the article. People really do read between the lines.

He is a person, BTW, who made an enormous difference to my health and mental well being.

I truly fear for Mr. Assange’s life. An attempted break in has been reported and some weird equipment on new scaffolding outside. I wonder if the people who want him dead will try a repeat of the Moscow embassy incident during the cold war, which was fatal to several embassy personnel.

inforebelscum/November 4, 2018

Great take Caitlin. However, I have to ask why is it the left is against the methods and tactics used by TPTB against Assage while the left uses the exact same methods and tactics against anyone they disagree with. Replace “Assage” with “straight White men” and Caitlin’s main argument remains the same.

Jon/November 4, 2018

“The hugely intelligent James Corbett: … please provide a source for this as it is not immediately obvious. “Smart people worked out” … again, please provide a source for this otherwise, we would have to assume that you are the person granting Corbett the qualification of “hugely intelligent” and you are the person complimenting oneself as one of the “Smart people” … again, none of this is obvious from your comment.

Greenwald, who sold out to the Intercept’s resident oligarch and sold Snowden down the river, burying most of what he released? Okay, whatever.

Do you understand why JA is unable to leave The Embassy? Do you think he is unable to leave because the most powerful people in this world want him to be free, to roam the world as a free man enjoying his success as a combatant for feedback from the corruption your tax dollars are paying for? If so, you have just been certified as an idiot. If you think he cannot leave because the most powerful people in this world hate him but do not think it is worth breaking diplomatic immunity to get him, then you are probably of average intelligence.

Where are your balls in this picture? Nowhere to be seen other than on the keyboard? Whatever!

Eric McOo/November 4, 2018

Assange won’t leave the embassy because his masters at MI6 got him a place there to protect him from Swedish prosecution. Assange ALWAYS ends up in the UK no matter what he does.When he was supposedly on the run from the American authorities he gave a speech to the world’s media in London, America’s most servile ‘friend’. That is so ludicrous, even a hysterical fanboy might think twice but no, fanboys are fanboys. That’s the world’s corporate mainstream media.

Then he lived in Ellingham Hall, the stately home of a British aristocrat who was an embedded journalist with the British army in Afghanistan. How many British aristocrats do you know ?

Here is another intelligent observer Scott Creighton on John Young who was so credible, they wanted him to basically lead Wikileaks and who eventually thought it was a CIA front. No opinions, no fanboyism, no hysterics, no ‘rah rah rah, you go Julian, fight those baddies’, just intelligent analysis.

“The following is from one of the last email communications with Assange that John Young sent him which he had released to the public once he came to his conclusions.

“All the messages received were published. My objections had been building, shown in later messages, after initial support. The finally fed-up turnaround occurred with the publication today of the $5 million dollar by July fund-raising goal — see messages at the tail-end. I called that — along with a delay in offering a public discussion and critique forum and failure to provide a credible batch of leaked documents for public scrutiny — a surefire indication of a scam. This is the exact technique used by snake oilers, pols and spies. Requests to Cryptome to keep stuff quiet are regular fare and they always get published. Next up, the names and affiliations of the perps if they don’t reveal themselves in an open forum.” John Young, Dec. 2006

Eric McOo/November 12, 2018

Yes, Corbett is intelligent. I’ve agreed with much that he lays out. But he’s not perfect. He’s wrong on global warming, in my opinion. And he does a smear job on Noam Chomsky that is not up to his usual high standards. I hadn’t seen the above video. I find it disturbing. No, I am siding with them. I am, though, hoping that they have changed their minds about Julian and Wikileaks. As for Greenwald, I lost my respect for him, and all Intercept writers, when I discovered (via Panda’s writers), that their boss Pierre Omidyar was a funder of the new Nazi Ukrainian government. Elizabeth Vos does a great job of explaining, simply, the big problem with all those progressive journos allowing themselves to be corralled by a billionaire. It wasn’t going to end well. For me, it ended badly when I came across Murtaza Hussein’s pro USAID, pro White Helmets article. If Greenwald et al didn’t know what they were getting into when they first signed on, Do they now? If they know now, Why are they enabling Omidyar? And, as lost as Sibel Edmonds is (now), she was probably completely right about Glenn Greenwald and the Snowden files. Could they be in ‘worse’ hands?

I meant to say, “No, I am ‘not’ siding with them.” This site is in bad need of repair. You can’t paragraph. You can’t edit. And the page goes screwy the longer the threads get, which doesn’t take long.

Eric McOo/November 6, 2018

Greenwald went from the Guardian to Omidyar. He also supported GW Bush’s war on Iraq. He had nowhere to fall from there. He does know about Omidyar. No surprise Greenwald would work for the CIA, paid through their conduit, Pierre Omidyar .

“Edmonds further stated that Greenwald had confirmed Omidyar’s long-running partnership with the CIA and other government agencies on Twitter during a heated exchange between the two in 2013.

Omidyar is also well-connected to Snowden’s former employer Booz Allen Hamilton, a major government contractor known as the “world’s most profitable spy organization,” whose former executives include James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, and Michael McConnell, former Director of the NSA. Omidyar’s Ulupono Initiative, a venture capital fund that operates in his home state of Hawaii, cosponsors one of the Pentagon’s most important contractor expos, in which Booz Allen Hamilton – and the Department of Defense – have a major stake. In addition, a former Booz Allen Hamilton vice president, Kyle Datta, is General Partner of Omidyar’s Ulupono Initiative.

Marshalldoc/November 4, 2018

Sometimes I wish Caitlin would just come right out and say what’s on her mind instead of beating around the bush…

More seriously, I particularly enjoy Caitlin’s prose since she’s able to express the outrage I feel about the things I care about and which I’d love to be able to speak about with her eloquence but which, in my advancing years, only manifest themselves as a trickle of drool from the corner of my lips… sigh.

Marie/November 3, 2018

This is like the way media like The Scum tried to alienate sympathy from the women of the Greenham Common protest, by portraying them as scruffy, flat chested lesbians who lived in squalor and ignored their personal hygiene. The problem is, the sort of people who believe the Sun believe this without even having to be told it: they feel it in their gut.

Hope/November 3, 2018

Sam Ursu/November 3, 2018

good lord! Much of what Wikileaks has been invaluable for people living in Romania to discover both what people in their own country are doing (i.e. president going EVERY WEEK to report to the US Embassy) as well as what the US is doing in Romania (one tiny example – pressuring the Romanian gov’t to give contracts to Coca-Cola over a domestic beverage firm).

When I looked at two organizations whose purpose is to support journalists, Pen International (@Pen_int) and Pen Canada (@PenCanada), I could find nothing there on Julian. At Pen International there’s Ashoggi, there’s the , Russia’s crackdown on free speech, but Julian, no. It’s as if the most important publisher of our time doesn’t exist.

Cat/November 3, 2018

In the world of prisons, the altar ego of such brown-nosing journalists are known as snitches. As lowest of the low along with pedophiles, they are the first to be taken out. Witness the recent bludgeoning of super-snitch Whitey Bulger. In another world, these corporate-ladder-climbing cowards would be toast.

Jon/November 3, 2018

JA will always be attacked, he is one of the legends of the campaign to educate the little people of the world on what is really being done in our name and with our tax dollars. We, his supporters, are not interested in smut about his human frailties. I support him for his good work and now his sacrifice which is similar to that of any of the whisleblowers who felt that the world needed to know what is really happening.

Jim KABLE/November 2, 2018

Thank-you once again Caitlin for your honesty, concern, ability to point out the ugliness and self-serving nature of those who attack Julian. He is my hero (well, he is heroic and I recognise the qualities which make him thus) against the ugly fascist secretiveness of the major powers – especially the US!

I note that satirist Sammy J in Australia has just made a John CLARKE/John Howard-like apology (to Indigenous Australians) – in his case – as Australia’s PM of 2068 – saying sorry to all those caught up in Australia’s ugliness – treatment of asylum-seekers as criminals – Manus, Nauru, Christmas Island – and their years of suffering as adults (until 2068) – the effects of their illegal incarceration and torture, murders and so forth at the behest of the Australian government of the day (these past decades) – so too one day will be apologies be due, formally, by the Australian government – to Julian Assange – by the British government – to Julian Assange – and while famously reluctant to ever say sorry for any other brutal things done in its name – by the US government, too – to Julian Assange.

Phinneas T. Winterbottom/November 2, 2018

Jennifer Cole/November 2, 2018

Any media outlet failing to defend Assange’s right as a journalist to publish the truth is telling you they will under no circumstances undertake any risk to tell you the truth. And they think so little of you you’re not even expected to see through that.

Murphy/November 2, 2018

I don’t get why mainstream media is a problem. We know what it means. And the term is not that deficient. It is ‘main’, in that it has the backing of the resource-rich Right. It dominates and is big. I live in Toronto and flit around coffee shops, mostly independents. Corporate media sits around. There are not even any fake alt media (Nation, Mother Jones, In These Times, ISO, etc) journos for folks to read. A fabulous new coffee shop just opened (Oldtown Bodega on King St) and it has already become one of my homes away from home. The owners are awesome, but Matt, the owner who makes my drinks and welcomes me warmly every time he sees me, told me that he doesn’t have any opinions about anything. He doesn’t care. That’s his choice. He cares enough to be a decent enough fellow and a great parent, but he doesn’t follow politics. But that didn’t prevent him from providing major dailies for free, which I saw on my last visit. And that’s fine. I’m there often enough and if major media spin wants to go toe to toe with me, we only win. I can’t yap with Matt about deep stuff, much, but I sure mixed it up with one of his friends who immediately became one of my friends. We talked Brexit, Scotland independence referendums, Ireland, various authors, technocracy and education and I will not fail to talk about, ahem, major media, when the subject comes up.

Addy/November 2, 2018

The mounting attacks on Assange should be viewed in context of the promises from Dem leaders that they will fully revive the Russiagate agenda if they retake the House next week. In which case, the ugliness we’re seeing now is probably only a hint of what’s to come.

Ishkabibble/November 2, 2018

Good angle. Now, here’s a question for everyone reading Caitlin’s article. If Agent Orange announced today that he would unconditionally pardon Assange for any crime related to, for lack of a better way of putting it, his making public the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, would that benefit the “R” side of the same coin in the upcoming mid-term, and how would doing that affect AO’s chances of being re-elected? (For good measure, add Snowden to the pardon list, too.)

It is hard not to get enraged by the evil opportunism of people who try to build a career on carrying the water for the plutocrats. And yet, disgust and furor are not healthy, high adrenaline levels and high blood pressure are not healthy, anger and despair will only make us sick. ………. If we would open our eyes and hearts wide to all the evil in the world and deeply feel the injustice, the pain and suffering which clearly exists, it would overwhelm us, paralyze us, and kill us. ………. It is better to calm down, activate the parasympathetic nervous system, smile and breathe with the diaphragm, maybe contemplate the four noble truth or something similar. Important decisions should be made in a state of composure and serenity. ………. There are many psychopaths and sociopaths among our fellow humans, mentally sick people who have to be restrained, contained, subdued, neutralized. If they are rulers, they should be removed in a preferably nonviolent way. If they are underlings, henchmen, lackeys, minions, they have to be named, shamed, and isolated. ………. This is a nearly impossible task, this is a mission which only can succeed if there is a common goal, a clear strategy, endurance, determination, and the ability to cooperate in secret networks of the resistance movement. ………. And again, calmness and self-control is needed if one wants to achieve anything.

Ishkabibble/November 2, 2018

“This is a nearly impossible task, this is a mission which only can succeed if there is a common goal, a clear strategy, endurance, determination, and the ability to cooperate in secret networks of the resistance movement.” ===== Sounds great. Now, just exactly WHAT IS the “common goal” that is going to be reached by a “clear strategy, endurance, determination, and the ability to cooperate in secret networks of the resistance movement”? Please be as detailed as possible. After all, if you, let alone “we”, are not capable of stating what that goal is, our “task” will not be “nearly” impossible, it will be literally impossible.

I didn’t specify the “common goal” and also not the “clear strategy” because it was not the focus of my comment. The common goal could be for instance: ………. a) Avoiding nuclear war and all other kind of wars and armed conflicts. ………. b) Establishing a cultural, social, economic, political paradigm of tolerance, cooperation, modesty, kindness (include at your liking everything closely related like decency, honesty, grace, etc.). ………. c) Avoiding the collapse of the worlds ecosystems. ………. Derived from that are secondary goals: ………. 1) Disabling as many weapons as possible, disarming, disbanding, dissolving, liquidating armies, militias, and all other armed groups. ………. 2) Living a life that causes the smallest possible ecological footprint (using only the absolute minimum of energy and materials, producing no waste). ………. 3) Reducing human population to a sustainable level of 2 – 4 billion (achievable with a no-child policy). ………. The issue of realistic, rational, sensible strategies to achieve these goals has been discussed since decades and thousands of books have been written about it. Same aspects and detailed tactics cannot be discussed publicly. Individuals who wholeheartedly support the goals will join an activist group or found one, connect with other groups, and develop appropriate strategies and tactics.

inforebelscum/November 4, 2018

Wolf, re your point b, how will you get the left to agree to such terms?

Secondary point 1, who will have the ability to do the disarming? And why should people be denied their Natural Law Right of self defense?! By what authoritah does one individual have to deny other individuals their NLR?

SP 2, how will you convince everyone in the world to devolve back to primative living?

SP 3, Whites are not producing at replacement levels so any call for population reduction will have to be for POC to stop reproducing. Cannot wait to see the left try to do that!

What about those, like myself, who do not share your vision? Will you use reason or violence to persuade others of your goals?

“It is hard not to get enraged by the evil opportunism of people who try to build a career on carrying the water for the plutocrats.” Absolutely true. But it’s also not too hard, once you’ve applied yourself (which requires – don’t hit me – serious reading), to expose them. Also important, Simply understand what is happening. Caitlin expertly described what is happening without giving the label that I give it, namely ‘gatekeeping’. That may be because we have different ideas of gatekeeping, which is fine. Her description is of activity that I call gatekeeping (explained on my blog, A Yappy Trade Barrier). There are two kinds of gatekeepers, namely appointed: 1. There’s gatekeepers who are paid, and directed and more focussed in their gatekeeping activity therefore, and more aware of their role as hindrances for those with the ‘wrong’ political view. 2. There’s self-appointed gatekeepers, who are simply individuals, even groups, who just take it upon themselves to be a hindrance – which can involve serious and less serious hindering – of those with the ‘wrong’ political views. What are the ‘right’ political views? Exactly what Caitlin said they are. They are whatever those with power say they are. The gatekeeper makes a decision to survive simply by supporting those with the power to economically protect them, prosper them, elevate them, etc.. They are what I call self-modified people who have jettisoned their God-given conscience and who have replaced the golden rule of ‘do to others as you would have them do to you’ with ‘riches for the strongest’. They see survival, in this dark world, as depending on the willingness to sin. And so, The rule is ‘sin and survive’. Normal people, who have not self-modified, however, feel that ‘how’ you survive is as important as simply surviving. (As a Christian, I also believe that ‘we’ can’t save the world, as in fix it and fix people. Not all people are fixable. I don’t subscribe to Hollywood’s idea that, as Luke Skywalker told Leia, ‘No one is every really gone’. I’m told otherwise. God will save the world and I’m not God.) Others have an idea about gatekeeping that sees activity that merely prevents specific communication from occurring as gatekeeping. My idea of gatekeeping is simply broader. Not only are the communications of those with the ‘wrong’ political views targetted, but so too are the communicators themselves.

Eric McOo/November 2, 2018

He is vain, secretive, paranoid and jealous, prone to leering at young women and making frequent sexist jokes – and that’s not the view of one of his many enemies, but of a friend who regards him sympathetically.

A damning picture of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks who is currently sheltering in the Ecuadorean embassy in London in a bid to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape charges, has emerged in a detailed account by his ghostwriter Andrew O’Hagan….

Earlier O’Hagan had watched as Assange leered at two 14-year-old girls as they walked past a café table at which they were sitting. O’Hagan writes how Assange thought they were “fine”, until he saw one was wearing braces.

Even Assange’s girlfriend, WikiLeaks researcher Sarah Harrison, grew increasingly frustrated at his behaviour during the weeks he spent on bail at Ellingham Hall, in Norfolk, the home of another of his guarantors, Vaughan Smith, the founder of the Frontline Club.

Miss Harrison says of Assange: “He openly chats girls up and has his hands on their a**e and goes nuts if I even talk to another guy. He’s like threatened to fire me a few times and always for crazy reasons. One of the times was literally because I had hugged another member of staff. Julian was like ‘that’s so disrespectful to me’.”

Ishkabibble/November 2, 2018

I repeat, just exactly WHAT is the point of your character assassination of Assange? So WHAT if he is a nasty little creep? .. Wikileaks is not a fraud, if by fraud you mean that WL has never published any truth. If you have some other definition of fraud, please state what it is.

Eric McOo/November 3, 2018

Ishkabibble/November 3, 2018

I find what Wikileaks publishes to be valuable and I am not a member of any agency of government. .. Bill Binney proved that the material on the DNC server was likely downloaded to a USB drive, although I suppose it could have been downloaded to another hard drive or SSD. The know speed of the download was much to fast to do that over the internet. .. Russians being indicted by Americans means absolutely nothing.

Eric McOo/November 3, 2018

Russians being indicted by Americans for hacking is exactly what the government wants to push their Russiagate nonsense. In my view that’s why Wikileaks published the Podesta emails. Seth Rich is completely and utterly dead and will be telling his truth to no one.

Ishkabibble/November 3, 2018

Americans will indict Russians based solely on domestic political expediency. Nothing else. .. The Podesta emails were not released in order to get American authorities to indict Russians. They were released in order to give otherwise in-the-dark Americans and everybody else in the world the information contained in them. .. Seth Rich may not have been the person who downloaded those files. Assange probably knows the true source. Hopefully he will reveal that source when he believes that it is safe to do so.

Eric McOo/November 3, 2018

Ishkabibble/November 3, 2018

I did not hear Assange say that Rich was his source, although he did not say that Rich was not his source. In other words, he left it up in the air. .. If I remember correctly, Asange did offer a reward for information leading to the arrest of Rich’s killer. .. Again, I believe that Assange likely knows who the source was and will at some point, under certain circumstances, reveal who that source was. For example, I believe that Assange’s lawyer(s) told the intelligence committee that if he were given the opportunity to testify under immunity, he would in fact reveal the source and disprove the assertion that the Russians hacked the DNC server. So far, anyway, he has not been taken up on his offer. In fact, since that offer, the US has been applying more and more pressure to get its hands on Assange, most likely to permanently shut him up rather than have him expose the truth that Bill Binney states the NSA already knows. .. Assange may not be a saint, but he certainly is one of the most effective, important journalists that I’ve known of in my lifetime– right up there with Seymour Hersh, Robert Parry and Sydney Shanberg. He has given the world a lot of vital information and he deserves our unwavering support for having done that and not because he’s a perfect human being.

Ishkabibble/November 2, 2018

“Reporters who bash Julian Assange while he is silenced instead of using their platforms to draw attention to the many, many wicked deeds that are being perpetrated by the powerful in their own country are the lowest of the low. They are scum. They are the scum that scum scrapes off its shoes. There is no more despicable, sniveling waste of space on this earth than someone who attacks the powerless on behalf of the powerful while calling themselves a journalist.” ======= Yeah, but they’re making a lot of MONEY! When you work for Satan you have to say or write what you know, without even being told, what Satan wants. That’s the road to “success in journalism” in the latest version of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. If you try really, really hard, and say what you think Satan wants to hear, you might become the next Madcow or Blitzer, etc. millionaire. In short, we are living in a world in which the absolute worst journalists make the most money, and the absolute best journalists end up in Russia, an Ecuadoran embassy or in jail. (Do you think schools of journalism mention any of this reality stuff to their students?)

Jim KABLE/November 2, 2018

I taught for many years in Japan. Middle schoolers loved talking about what they wanted to become and why. A doctor – to help people (thinking volunteer time in the Third World); a teacher – to help people – a whatever – but always to help others/our world (not just Japan) it was hugely impressive. One of my students was the daughter of the Japanese Minister for Education and Science – she eventually took her Masters in Social Welfare in the US. Very, very occasionally – I think twice over nearly two decades – students said they wanted to be – rich! It was so rare an event that I was usually able to muster a choking reaction – a What the?!!! kind of reaction. Why – I would ask. It seemed so senseless. There was never any positive kind of response – being rich was apparently aim and reason. Tom, I like your point. I was a Christian when a boy – then I gave it away (too much blatant hypocrisy among other untoward things) and I became a teacher (the aim of becoming rich exists nowhere in that profession) – it is about “serving” with truth our students – our societies, our world. That’s why Caitlin’s pursuit of truth is so important!

Tweets

"And ironically, years ago, when I first got into the FBI, one of the missions of the FBI in its counterintelligence efforts was to try and keep these people out of government." https://t.co/fh4ePI0j3B

Here's an Israeli government official calling Michelle Alexander's column in the NYT about Palestinian rights, based on MLK's philosophy, a "strategic threat," and warns that Israel will "treat it as such." How will Israel treat Alexander's column as a "strategic threat"? Creepy